Archive | Agile Product Management

Let’s start with a birds-eye-view of understanding Scrum. We’ll define the main phases of a Scrum project framework and explore each of these in detail later. Watch Our Sample Video From the new Agile Excellence for Product Managers and Product Owners Online Self-Study Course In Scrum, we have a list of Product Requirements called the Product Backlog. In Scrum, these are referred to as User Stories. These requirements are prioritized from top to bottom according to business value and they…[continue reading]

Prioritize Product Backlogs in Three Easy Steps Using effective, time-tested techniques to prioritize product backlogs is an important step in getting a product to market rapidly that meets customer needs. If you prioritize your backlog in a non-optimal manner then you may be wasting engineering resources by having them build features that aren’t the highest priority and don’t add the most value to your products. This video tutorial and blog post teach you how to prioritize product backlogs if you…[continue reading]

I recently attended a meeting of the Silicon Valley Agile Leadership Network on the topic Agile Beyond Software. The speaker was Jeanne Bradford, her talk was based on her experience developing customized Agile processes for hardware companies. She was not presenting a process that can be adopted as-is by a large number of hardware companies in the way that Scrum can be adopted by software companies. At the start, Jeanne said that people doing Agile software might find their “heads…[continue reading]

Tesla Agile Development: Version 8.0 Software and Product Management at its best. Last week I received the version 8 update from Tesla. For those of you unfamiliar with how updates work with Tesla and the Model S or X, your car connects to your home wifi and then every month or so you get great new features downloaded. In my case, since I purchased my model S one year ago I have received autopilot (the car accelerates, brakes and steers…[continue reading]

Regardless of which role or title you may have, you should have at least a basic understanding of the Product Owner vs. Product Manager comparison; similarities, differences, and overlap. Why? In our recent Product Management Team Survey we found that in companies doing Agile development, 70% indicated that the Product Manager is also the Product Owner. If you don’t have a good understanding of both roles (whether you are doing both or just interacting with someone doing one of them)…[continue reading]

Agile is a Development Practice, Product Management is a Business Practice Agile software development has transformed how we approach software product development, and has delivered some enormous benefits for efficiently delivering software products to the market. This has all been good, but in the process of improving our approaches to software development, Agile has created a lot of confusion for Product Management, resulting in some dangerous and damaging interpretations of what Product Management means. Where does the confusion come from?…[continue reading]

People Skills for Product Owners vs. Product Managers Teach Product Owners people skills? This will be easy, I thought; and then after a frustrating few hours I realized that they were tackling the issue from a different perspective. I know that most Product Managers and Product Owners work closely with engineers and development groups. As part of that work, they need to be able to influence these teams. Then why do their approaches towards their teams need to be different?…[continue reading]